


The Siege of Annwfn

by Emma



Series: The Homecoming Universe [5]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-07
Updated: 2012-07-06
Packaged: 2017-11-09 08:12:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 16,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/453280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emma/pseuds/Emma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only things that stand between our Universe and disaster are Torchwood Three and Ianto’s growing powers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

          Over the years, Jack had grown to hate visiting London. As soon as Gwen had felt comfortable handling liaison work on her own he had turned it all over to her with a sigh of relief. These days, with Ianto back home, he was even less inclined to leave Cardiff. The others teased him about that – intergalactic traveler puts down roots in small town – but Jack knew that it was simply his way of creating sweet memories to stand against a lonely future. He still marveled at the little family that had gathered around him, and he wanted to enjoy that feeling of belonging as long as possible.

            Still, when Francine Jones said _jump_ one asked _how high_ on the way up. Nearing ninety, Martha’s indomitable mother had become adoptive grandmother and unofficial Torchwood matriarch after Gwen’s mother had unexpectedly been diagnosed with invasive cancer. Francine had swept down from London and taken over the Cooper-Williams household and the newborn twins, leaving Gwen and Rhys free to handle arrangements for care, treatment, and ultimately, the funeral.

            One night while waiting for Gwen and Rhys to return from hospital, Jack had told Francine about the great battle against Davros and his new breed of Dalek, and of Donna Noble’s amazing transformation. Jack worried about Donna. He had arranged for Torchwood One to keep an eye on her and her family, but didn’t dare approach them himself, fearing one single slip that could trigger her memories. When she returned to London, Francine had managed to befriend Wilfred and Sylvia and had kept Jack informed of what was happening in Donna’s life.

            That morning, Jack had received a call from Francine. “Jack, you need to get here today. Donna collapsed suddenly this morning. She’s in intensive care at St. Michael’s. And Jack… her memory is coming back.”

            Jack and Martha had made the trip to London in record time. St. Michael’s was a small institution that served UNIT and Torchwood families. Francine had bullied the London authorities into transferring Donna to their intensive care unit. The fact that she could throw around not only Jack’s name but that of  Dr. Martha Jones, Torchwood Chief Medical Officer, and Professor Tish Jones, Head of Linguistic Studies for Torchwood’s research lab, seemed to have worked wonders.

            They found Francine and Sylvia Noble in the ICU waiting room. Donna’s mother seemed sad but oddly resigned.

            “She was never the same after he brought her back. Oh, she sounded the same, and she had this drive. She had her own business, did you know? SuperTemp, very successful. But there was always something sad and lost underneath. She would cry in her sleep. She had obsessions about the oddest things, like Pompeii, watched every show on the telly, visited museums, the lot. She even read up on World War II uniforms.” She looked Jack up and down. “Now I know why.”

            “She had been feeling ill for some time,” Francine said, “but she kept insisting it was just allergies. This morning she went into convulsions and collapsed. When she came to, she started asking about the two of you and Sarah Jane Smith.”

            “She’s in pain, though,” Sylvia whispered. “I can see it in her eyes.”

            Jack and Martha shared a sad look. Donna’s human brain couldn’t hold all the knowledge she had acquired from the Doctor’s mind during the biological metacrisis that had created the second, human Doctor, and the Doctor Donna the Ood had prophesied. The more she remembered, the more likely it was that her brain would overload and kill her.

            “Then we better get in there and see if there’s anything we can do.’ Jack squeezed Sylvia’s hand. “Thank you for letting Francine call us. Donna means a lot to us.”

            He followed Martha down the corridor and into Donna’s room. She lay in bed, propped up with several pillows. In Jack’s eyes she seemed little changed from the last time he had seen her, except for the lines of pain that creased her forehead and bracketed her lips. There were all kinds of sensors attached to her body, and an IV dripped something into her left arm. The shades had been drawn and the lights dimmed.

            A nurse sat by the bedside, holding Donna’s hand. He looked up at their entrance, looking immediately relieved.

            “You must be Captain Harkness and Doctor Jones. I’m so glad you’re here. I was afraid that…” He broke off with an apologetic little shrug.

            “Just say it, Nursie Boy.” Donna’s voice was weak but held the same amount of acid it always had. “Before I go under for the last time. Hello, dish.”

            Jack grinned at her. “Hello, gorgeous.”

            “I was talking to Martha, Jack.” She laughed, and then started to cough. “Jesus. Even laughing hurts. Martha, stop reading my chart. I’m dying, and there’s naught to be done about it.”

            “Stop sassing the doctor, Red.” Jack nodded at the nurse. “Could you give us a few minutes?”

            The young man hesitated, then nodded and left the room. Jack sat down in the chair he had vacated and took Donna’s hand.

            “I won’t ask how you’re feeling.”

            “Good idea. I’d hate to have my last action be smacking you one in the ear.” She patted his cheek. “I’m glad you’re here. Both of you.”

            Martha sat on the other side of the bed. “Donna, we could call the Doctor…”

            “No! I would rather die than lose my memories again, and you both know it. Otherwise the skinny Martian would be standing here right now.”

            Jack kissed her knuckles. “You know us too well, Red.”

            “So keep me happy for a while. Tell me what’s going on with you.”

            Jack spoke for a while, telling her about Ianto, Cardiff, the team at Torchwood Three, and his godchild Toshiko. Donna seemed content to just to listen, soaking up twenty-three years of friendship in a few minutes. Finally, when he judged she would listen calmly, Jack asked her again.

            “Donna, are you sure you don’t want us to call the Doctor?”

            “After I’m gone, Jack. If he shows up now he’d try to talk me into… going back… and I don’t want to end my days fighting with my best friend.”

            “All right.”

            Her mind seemed to meander off  into the past. “He did so much for me. I saw places, did things… Sometimes he worried about what he does to people. Silly. He’s lived so long and lost to much that he forgets that he can’t keep us in cotton wool forever…aaah.” She rubbed her forehead. “Damn headache. Jack, tell him…”

            Her body arched off the bed and she moaned in pain. Jack held her down. Her hand grabbed at him as she gasped.

            “Jack… Martha… it’s so beautiful… I can see it all, and it’s beautiful…”

            She screamed as her body convulsed again. Jack heard someone running down the corridor, and then the nurse rushed in. He was carrying a full syringe which he plunged into the IV. Within a few minutes, Donna relaxed and lay back.

            “She’ll be asleep for quite a while,” the nurse said. “The crises are coming faster and the pain is stronger each time. The only way for her to rest is to be under completely. You should go home and get some rest yourselves. I’m sorry to say it, but tomorrow might be your last chance to talk to her.”

            “Thank you…”

            “Gwair, ma’am.”

            “Welsh?”

            “Yes, ma’am. From Caerau, right outside Cardiff. I understand that you both live there.”

            “We do, Gwair.” Jack took Martha’s arm. “Thank you for taking care of her. We’ll be back tomorrow.”

            Jack left Martha with Francine and Sylvia and went to get the SUV. He felt unhappy about keeping the Doctor in the dark, but he understood Donna’s determination to remember her amazing days as a Companion. The Doctor had once told him that the Ood still sang in Donna’s honour. How could the Time Lord think she would willingly forget making such a difference?

            _*Jack! Go back! Something’s happening to Donna!*_

            Ianto’s mind-scream was almost painful in its intensity. Instinctively, Jack wheeled around towards Donna’s room, shouting for Martha as he ran. He crashed through the door to see Gwair struggling with a rainbow-colored shifting mass of energy that seemed to trail from Donna’s body. The nurse no longer wore his uniform. Instead he seemed clothed in white robes, like a priest. A gleaming blue-gray chain was wrapped around his waist, the other end trailing off into… nothing. At least nothing Jack could see, but he could sense it was there, pulling Gwair back into itself.

            Jack heard Martha come into the room. He tried to hold on to Gwair, only to be sent crashing to the ground by a violent jolt. He saw the young man being pulled towards the nothingness, arms full of energy. He looked grief-stricken, and there were tears running down his cheeks.

            “Remember!” he shouted. “Only seven returned!”

            And then he was gone, and the room was empty. Jack picked himself off the floor and looked at the bed. Martha was cradling Donna’s body.

            “She’s dead, Jack. Donna’s dead.”


	2. Chapter 2

         Ianto grabbed Gwen’s arm and pulled her down. “Sit the hell down, woman, before you fall over!”

             Torchwood’s second-in-command sank into the armchair with a sigh of relief. “I can’t believe how long that took. Sometimes I think they do it for the pleasure of hearing themselves talk. And then that ridiculous ceremony, and me in high heels!”

             Ianto straddled the ottoman and patted the leather in front of him invitingly. Gwen kicked off her shoes and obliged, moaning in appreciation as his strong fingers rubbed her abused extremities from toes to calf.

             “Bureaucrats live for pomp and circumstance. Being invited to participate in an Ixen High Court treaty ceremony must have given them all orgasms.” He dug his thumbs into her heels, making her moan again. ‘And you still haven’t gotten over your fondness for these things.”

             “Blame Toshiko. I was a nice Welsh girl who wore sensible trainers on the job until I became friends with a shoe demon.”

             They grinned at each other. I was lovely to be able to talk about the friends they had lost without feeling terrible grief. There had been a time when neither one of them believed it would happen.

             “How she managed not to break her neck, I’ll never know.” Ianto snickered. “And I hear Toshi’s heading the same way.”

             “Nothing makes that girl happier than to clack about the house in my Jimmy Choos. My three-hundred-quid-on-sale Jimmy Choos!”

             They were still laughing when the cog door opened and Jack and Martha walked in.

             “Oi!” Jack said mock-aggrieved.  “How come she gets foot massages?”

             “Because her feet are prettier than yours?”

             “There’s something to that.”

             Jack leaned down to press his lips to Ianto’s, sighing softly. Ianto could feel the exhaustion and grief emanating from his lover.

             “You two, sit down. I’ll go make us all coffee.” He kissed Martha’s cheek in passing. “Tea for you?”

             “No, I think I need coffee today.” Martha plopped down into the ottoman he had vacated. “It’s been a miserable two days.”

             In the kitchen Ianto washed the assortment of crockery he found in the sink – twenty-odd years and they still couldn’t wash their own mugs! – then started the coffee. He decided to make enough for everyone and add a little extra pickup. Thankfully the Penderyn was still kept on the same shelf. He considered the tray thoughtfully and decided to add another pot of coffee; knowing Jack, this meeting he had called could go on until all hours.

             By the time he finished with preparations, the team had moved to the conference room. When Ianto entered with the loaded tray, John Hart clapped his hands mockingly.

             “The tea-boy’s home! Talk about flashbacks.”

             “Prat,” said Ianto. “I still owe you a shooting. Don’t tempt me.”

             “Ooooh, scary.” John grabbed his mug and sipped. His whole body seemed to melt down until he was slouched in his chair. “Wow. This I could happily get shot for.”

             Ianto distributed the other mugs then sat down next to Jack. He wondered if leaving his old space open had been a coincidence or if the Torchwood team was sending him a subtle message.

             ‘Thank you.” Jack stroked his wrist briefly. “I needed this.”

             Martha took a long appreciative sip of her coffee, but, very Martha-like, was already worrying about the problem at hand. “Ianto, Jack said you warned him about what has happening to Donna. How did you know?”

             “The TARDIS told me.” He pulled his sleeve back to expose the bracelet. “I was at the Castle doing some location scouting and suddenly I was in the hospital room, standing in a corner, looking on.”

             “Did this… Gwair… kill Donna?”

             “No. That was very clear.” Ianto answered. “He was holding her, singing to her, as she died.”

             “At least it wasn’t murder,” Jack said. “But what the hell was that thing I saw coming out of her body?”

             “That was Donna’s Potentiality.”

             “Her _what?_ ” exclaimed John.

             Ianto took a few moments to organize his thoughts. “The way the Doctor’s TARDIS explained it to me, a TARDIS starts out as something she called a Metastructure. During the last battle with the Gallifreyans, the Daleks targeted the TARDIS nursery. Metastructures were shattered and the fragments flung out across time and space. The Metastructure fragments are attracted to a certain type of mind and can attach themselves to them at birth. That event triggers a Potentiality in the carrier.”

             “And Donna Noble had a Metastructure fragment inside her?”

             “Yes. It was probably the reason why she was able to survive the biological metacrisis.” Ianto said thoughtfully. “What happened to her was the equivalent of the Hub computer downloading all its files into my laptop at high speed. Not only did she survive something that should have blown all her circuits instantly but she was able to function at a very high level for quite a while.”

             “So when she died” Gwen said, “this Potentiality was set free?”

             “It was supposed to. And another thing, Potentialities are not visible. They are just that, a Space-Time mathematical possibility. Somehow someone made its energy signature visible, so it was possible to grab it.”

             John seemed about to speak, then he subsided. Ianto cocked an inquiring eyebrow. “You were going to say something?”

             “Do you have a Potentiality?”

             “It would be more accurate to ask if I am a Potentiality.” Ianto smiled. “Not… anymore.”

             John’s eyes flickered to the bracelet. “So, someone could use a Potentiality as a link to a TARDIS? Or as the nucleus for a new TARDIS?”

             “Both, I think. Except that Donna was also a Time Lord for a while, so… it’s anybody’s guess.”

             “From the policeman’s point of view,” Andy spoke up for the first time, “I’d say we need to find this Gwair fellow. Did you get anything on him?”

             “Only his name and that he was from Caerau,” Martha said. “The people at the hospital couldn’t find any records on him, and there should have been a considerable number. Getting a job at St. Michael’s is harder than getting a job at Buckingham Palace, but this guy just waltzed in. Everyone at the hospital remembers Gwair from Caerau, and that is all they remember.”

             “What’s making me nuts,” Jack said, pouring himself another cup of coffee, “was what he said to me. What the hell does _only seven returned_ mean? I’ve run the computer ragged with searches and nothing.”

             “Was that what you were looking for?” Andy snorted. “Sometimes you’re too clever and subtle by half. I can tell you what it means, though not how it fits into all this insanity.”

             Everyone looked at him as if he’d grown a second head. He stared back at them, his deadpan expression marred only by the suggestion of a tiny smirk. He pointed at Gwen and Ianto. “You two should be ashamed of yourselves. These are foreigners, but you are Welsh. You learned it in school.”

             The penny dropped for Gwen and Ianto at the same time.

             “Bloody hell!” Ianto cursed, chagrined. “My Tad would have my hide for lining fabric for forgetting it.”

             “You? Me!” Gwen said. “I had to recite the thing from memory every time my Nan and Grantad Cooper came to visit!”

             Jack gave an exaggerated sigh. “If you good and true Welshmen could enlighten the rest of us…”

             “It’s the Preiddeu Annwfn, Jack.” Ianto answered. “The Spoils of Annwfn. One of our most famous poems. It tells the story of King Arthur’s quest to steal the cauldron of the King of Annwfn, the Netherworld. According to the poem, Arthur sailed to Annwfn with three boatloads of men, but only seven returned. There’s even a list of survivors somewhere.”

             “Manawyddan, Taliesin, Pryderi, Llwch Lleminawg, Gwalchmei, Bedwyr, and Cei,” said Andy. “And Gwair mab Gwystyl was the prisoner.”

             “This poem mentions a Gwair?” asked Martha.

             “Gwair is a young warrior who is kept eternally prisoner in Annwfn, bound by a blue or gray chain, depending who translated the poem.”

             “So if I understand this correctly,” said John, “our hypothesis is that some mythological hero from the mythological Welsh underworld stole Donna Noble’s Potentiality?”

             “No quite,” said Jack. “But maybe… I don’t think Gwair was very happy with what he was doing, and he _really_ wanted us to pay attention to that poem. It wouldn’t be the first time information was encrypted into some innocent piece of writing.”

             “Jack,” Ianto said, “The Preiddeu Annwfn has been dated to between the ninth and twelfth centuries. That’s a lot of time to wait to pass on information.”

             “Some people have all the time in the Universe. Ianto… can you ask the TARDIS if it knows who took Donna?”

             “I can try, but don’t expect much. It certainly hasn’t answered anything I’ve asked before.”

             “Try.”

             Ianto touched his fingers to the bracelet as he closed his eyes. He had tried this before but the results had been discouraging. The TARDIS had seemed to be waiting for something; some signal that Ianto did not know how to give or some moment that hadn’t been reached yet. There was a patience to a TARDIS that was wholly unhuman and even though it was Ianto who was being transformed, it would happen on its timetable, not his. He was therefore utterly astonished when a detailed image arose in his mind before he even asked the question. He had never seen them, but he knew immediately who they were. His eyes snapped open.

             “You knew!” he said to Jack.  




             “I guessed. Was I right?”

             Ianto nodded.

             John snapped his fingers impatiently. “Well, don’t keep us in suspense, Eye-Candy.”

             “Time Lords. The TARDIS says Donna was taken by Time Lords.”


	3. Chapter 3

 

 

            It had rained all afternoon, and the deserted Plas still gleamed wetly in the light of the pillars. The tourists had decamped to their hotels to rest up for the next day’s mad dash to Caernarfon (for castle baggers) or Shrewsbury (for Brother Cadfael fans). Most of the locals had better sense than to stand about taking pictures in the pouring rain, and so had returned home soon after supper.

             Ianto had volunteered to go with Andy to the team’s favorite late-night takeaway and pick up some supper. He had been hoping for a little quiet time with Andy – or maybe not so quiet, because Andy’s attitude was pissing him off, and if a good fight could clear the air, so be it.

             During his tenure as Torchwood’s clean-up guy, Ianto had run into young PC Davidson quite often. Over the years their relationship had gone from one of mutual mistrust to one of mutual respect and assistance and ultimately to an odd but real sort of friendship. Ianto ignored retcon protocols and Andy looked the other way those times he came upon something he wasn’t supposed to see. They shared a beer or two and a few laughs from time to time, and Andy was one of the few people Ianto had allowed a glimpse of his private life.

             When he returned to Cardiff, Ianto had hoped to rebuild his friendship with Andy, but the former policeman had maintained a polite if cordial distance. That of itself would not have made Ianto angry. He had no right to demand anything from people he had walked out on years before. What bothered him was that, in unguarded moments, Andy would be his old funny, sarcastic, friendly self; but then he would look at Ianto, a cloud would come over his face, and he would retreat back into an impenetrable shell of perfect, impersonal courtesy. Ianto would love the first and would tolerate the second if he had to. It was just the uncertain mixture of the two that was driving him nuts.

             Now, as they walked side by side in uncomfortable silence, Ianto knew he would never have a better opportunity. On the principle that if it were to be done at all, it was best it were done quickly, he simply asked the question.

             “Andy, what did I do to make you angry?”

             Andy’s steps faltered for a moment. “I don’t know what…”

             “Andy. Please.”

             “It’s not you. It’s me.” Andy sighed.

             Ianto waited silently, afraid that anything he said or did would send Andy back into his shell.

             “When I got divorced, I went through a really lousy period. Two much bad booze, too much careless sex, too much erratic temper. I could feel myself falling apart but couldn’t, _could not_ , stop. Then one day Jack showed up at my place and told me that if I was going to party my life away I would have to learn to do it properly. We spent three days… God almighty, I did things I didn’t know could be done, and some things I _knew_ were illegal.” Andy looked up at Ianto, and then dropped his eyes in shame. “So at some point, I… well Jack and I…”

             “Andy, are you telling me that during this three day orgy you” Ianto searched for the best way to phrase it, “became Jack-sexual?”

             Andy nodded without looking up. “It was only that one time, but…”

             “You silly, silly, silly git!” Ianto exploded. “Twpsyn! Is that what this is all about? You thought I would be mad because you and Jack were in bed together once years ago? I swear, sometimes I wonder if there’s anything between those ears of yours!”

             ‘Ah…”

             “Andy,” Ianto steamrollered on. “I am not fool enough to think Jack became celibate when I left Cardiff. I didn’t, why should he? Not to mention that _Jack Harkness_ and _celibacy_ are terms that are never, ever going to be anywhere near the same sentence unless separated by _not._   To Jack good sex is love, joy, celebration, comfort, and in some cases therapy...”

             “He’s very good at it,” Andy blurted out then turned a fiery red that was noticeable even in the dim light of the street lamps. “Therapy, I mean.”

             “Yes, he is. People underestimate Jack because he’s so flamboyant and sometimes seems thoughtless, but he has an excellent understanding of what people need. I’ll bet you a hundred quid that he told you to call him up any time you felt like going wild again.”

             “He did, but I never did…”

             “And I’ll bet you another hundred quid that he knew you wouldn’t. You needed a safety net, Andy, and Jack very carefully built you one. He did the same for me, after Lisa. He’s like that with people he loves. So stop being stupid about it and let’s be friends again, all right?”

             Andy gave him a big grin. “All right.”

             “One other thing…”

             “Yeah?”

             “The next time you feel like going wild, tell me before you call Jack. I’ve been dying to take some pictures…”

             “Aaargh!” Andy threw up his hands. “You’re as bad as he is!”

             They laughed and joked all the way to the takeaway place. They argued about the spiciness of the curry and whether to get nargisi kofta or dal makhani for a vegetarian dish. To Ianto it finally felt as it things were as they should be. As much as he appreciated Tom and Rhys, he had missed Andy.

             His euphoria lasted until half-way back to the Hub. Fog had rolled in from the bay, dulling the existing light and making the cobbles underfoot dangerously slippery. It wasn’t an unusual occurrence after a heavy rain, but it felt wrong somehow. The white fog-wreaths had a sort of unhealthy phosphorescence, and seemed unaffected by the sudden gusts of wind that swept along the street.

             “Andy…”

             “Yes.” He sniffed the air. “Metallic, not salty. Let’s move a little faster and see what’s what.”

             They picked up the pace. Both had spent a great deal of time chasing criminals both alien and human through the streets of Cardiff in all kinds of weather, and they knew how to move quietly and leave behind little trace of their passing. It only took a few minutes before they heard the footsteps. Andy splayed his hand, all fingers extended, right under Ianto’s nose. Ianto nodded. At least five people were moving around them in the fog.

             Stashing their bags in a small space under some stairs, they began to run in the direction of the Plas. Whoever was behind them gave chase, but seemed uncertain of their direction. They had split up, Ianto realized, and were trying to head them off, but didn’t seem to have any familiarity with the area. He followed Andy’s lead down back streets and alleyways in a zigzagging path that kept them pointed towards the Hub. Ianto knew Andy would have activated the emergency signal that would warn the rest of the team they were in trouble and act as a beacon for a search. All they needed to do was keep a few steps ahead of their pursuers.

          As they approached the Plas, a cacophony of human screams and loud baying noises rose around them. The fog parted and they caught a glimpse of one of the things chasing them. It was a large white hound, a massive beast neither mastiff nor bloodhound, but partaking of both, and crowned by large red ears held stiffly away from its skull.

          “What the fuck?”

          Andy’s outburst triggered Ianto’s often inappropriate sense of humor, and he laughed. “It’s the Wild Hunt, Andy. We’re being chased by the Cwn Annwn.”

         “You know, I’m as proud of being Welsh as the next guy,” Andy gasped. “But this is just not acceptable.”

         The hounds were moving out into the Plas, trying to herd them back into the narrow street beyond. As they moved, their forms flickered in and out of focus, and Ianto could see a vague human form contained within.

         “Andy, what do you see?” At his friend’s incredulous look, he repeated the question. “What do you see?”

         “Seven bloody big dogs, what the hell would I see, you prat?”

         “We’re going to have to make a move soon. They know others are coming. Do me a favor. Shoot as if they were men, not dogs… Now!”

         Ianto launched himself at the nearest dog, kicking out at knee level. His foot made satisfyingly solid contact with something and the hound dropped. Ianto followed that with a glancing blow to the neck. Behind him he heard the sharp cough of Andy’s silenced gun, and running feet, but the other dogs were advancing on him. One snapped at his arm and tore off part of his coat sleeve. Another two, still some distance away, were launching into a run that would end in a leap at his throat.

  _*Like this.*_

          Suddenly Ianto was moving in impossibly smooth, flowing circles. Everything around him seemed to slow down. As the running hounds jumped towards him he moved underneath, seeking the vulnerable places in a man. The screams of pain were human, not animal.

         As they dropped to the ground the figures began winking out of existence, until Ianto was alone in the middle of the Plas. Jack and the rest of the team stood a short distance away, staring at him in shock. At Andy’s feet, a young man in a short grey robe with a gleaming black torque around his neck lay dead of a gunshot wound.

        “Ianto,” Jack said conversationally.” That book the Doctor gave you. Have you gotten to the part about battle TARDIS?”      





	4. Chapter 4

             “Come on, sweetheart. Yes, just like that, darling…”

             Jack and Ianto leaned on the railing of the stairs leading to Jack’s office and watched Torchwood’s resident computer genius at work. John Hart was bent over his i/o cube – nothing as pedestrian as a keyboard and scanner for him – crooning to the mainframe as he fed in data, retrieved results, and formulated new queries in an elegant waltz. Jack swore that at times he could actually see the mainframe respond, and he had the performance statistics to prove it. When John was working, everything got done faster and the probability extrapolations edged into flat-out wild-ass guesses, which should _not_ be possible for a computer.

             “Yes! That’s it! That’s it!” John ran his hands in feathery strokes over the cube. “Superb as usual, my love.”

             “John,” Ianto said teasingly, “after that performance you will have to ask her to marry you.”

             “I have, but the little tart insists on playing the field.” He waved the printout at Jack. “Get down here and look at this. I can’t make anything out of these readings.”

             Jack vaulted over the railing and landed in an easy crouch next to John. Ianto followed much more sedately, walking downstairs and around to John’s work station.

             Jack looked at the printout. “Mainframe. On screen. Show the power fluctuation graphs and the local radiation reads and correlate it with this data.”

             There was a small but noticeable hesitation, and then information flowed rapidly across the screen in a jumble of data, equations, and graphs that stabilized into four quadrants.

             “She’s given you a bit more than you asked for,” John said. “Thank you, love.”

             Ianto held up a hand. “Before you get into one of those discussions where the rest of us lose track before you get to the first _and_ , could you explain it in words of one syllable?”

             “I live for moments like this,” John smirked. “See this part here? It shows a huge energy spike each time we’ve had one of our little mythological encounters, which, by the way, getting yourself chased by giant hounds? Showing off, Eye-Candy, showing off. Anyway, these two here show that whatever generated the spikes was using Rift energy as the power source at a ruinous rate of exchange. This last one shows the particle-wave signature for the generated energy and that’s where the problem is, because I don’t recognize it, and, dammit, I thought I had run into every sort of possible radiation in the Universe.”

             Jack traced the image with his fingers. “You have encountered it, John; you just didn’t know you had.”

             “Oh?”

             “It’s called artron energy, and it’s the principal form of energy fuel used by a TARDIS.”

             “I thought you said the TARDIS used Rift energy… Ah. Conversion.”

             “Yeah. What I find puzzling is the conversion rate readouts. A TARDIS energy system is efficient beyond anything we will be able to build for centuries. It’s pretty much one-one particle conversion, and in an emergency it can be pushed to one-two. Whoever is behind this is not reaching even ten-one. They’re burning up Rift energy by the ton to get ounces of artron.”

             “Which is a weakness to keep in mind,” John said. “What else do we know about it?”

             “Artron energy is actually the energy of thought and perception…”

             “Is that how TARDIS communicate, then?” Ianto interrupted.

             “Give my favorite Welshman the prize” Jack said. “Artron energy causes TARDIS to generate a low-level telepathic field. But it’s more than that. Artron energy is produced every time a sentient being makes a choice, because a choice collapses a quantum-wave into a real-time event.”

             “So everyone has some of it?” John asked.

             “Everyone _generates_ a negligible amount of it. Very few actually _have_ it, except for Time Lords, Companions, and now Ianto. Artron energy is part of the Gallifreyan genetic makeup. The Doctor’s cells are partially powered by thought and perception. People who are in close contact with a TARDIS or who travel through the Vortex accumulate artron in their DNA, especially in neurons and glial cells in the brain. It makes us potentially highly telepathic.”

             “You went to the end of the Universe on the outside of a TARDIS,” Ianto said. “you’re probably swimming in the stuff.”

             “I knew there was a problem with his brain all along,” John mocked. “So you, Martha, and Ianto are probably the guinea pigs I need.”

             “Errr…John,” Ianto backed up dramatically. “What do you mean by guinea pigs?”

             “Easy, Eye-Candy. I’m going to reconfigure one of the Volian scanners we got last year into an artron detector. It shouldn’t be too difficult, but I’m going to need test scans to set the base readings.” He made a pointing-the-gun gesture in Ianto’s direction. “Bang. You’re it.”

             They laughed and bickered while John retrieved the scanner and set to work. Jack sometimes wondered at the easy friendship between the two men. Looking back, he didn’t know exactly what he had expected; armed truce, perhaps, or a clearly defined Maginot Line with no man’s land on either side. He was pleased that neither had come to pass, and, being a wise man in some things, he didn’t ask either man how their new relationship had been achieved.

             He looked up as Martha and Andy joined them. The two were freshly scrubbed and smelled of disinfectant. Martha had dragooned Andy into assisting at the autopsy of their “hound” since Gwen, who was considerably less squeamish, was spending the day in meetings with her counterparts in UNIT and the military establishments of several countries. Jack made a mental note to pop for a new pair of Jimmy Choos for his heroic second-in-command.

             “You have something for me, Martha?”

             “A number of anomalies. He is a human male, slightly below average in height and weight, about twenty-five. His teeth and stomach are in terrible shape. He has no dental work at all. His last meal was a disgusting mess of barley, oysters, and mutton swilled down with something like mead. He has signs of previous injuries, most from what I think were stone-tipped arrows. And he was wearing this.”

             Jack took the narrow torque she was offering. It was made of a metal he had not seen since the day he had destroyed the paradox engine. The metal had been etched and circuitry laid down along the grooves. The torque ended in a pair of spheres studded with pinhead-sized concave mirrors.

             “What is it?” Ianto asked.

             “It’s an illusion-field collar,” Jack said. “A Gallifreyan toy designed to develop children’s psionic abilities. The one wearing it casts an illusion and the others try to see through his disguise.”

             “Time Lord hide-and-seek, then?” said Andy.

             Jack laughed. “I guess so, although one time Rose and I used them to visit the Shrine of Ellanora during Festival. I thought the Doctor was going to blow out one of his hearts when he found out.” He tossed the torque on John’s work bench. “Here. Another guinea pig for your experiment. They are powered by artron energy, and the more they are used the more it accumulates in the circuitry.”

             John grunted his thanks and continued working. Martha started to say something, but a soft pinging noise from the medical bay attracted her attention.

             “Toxicology,” she told Jack as she walked away.

             “Martha.” Jack waited until she had turned to face him “I will tell him, but not yet. He has a bad habit of trying to save Time Lords from their own folly.”

             She nodded and left. Jack reached behind him without looking and found Ianto’s hand exactly where he expected it to be. Their fingers intertwined.

             “With you two it’s all grab, grab, grab.” John jumped up, brandishing the modified scanner. “Unlink. I need to read you separately.”

             Grinning, the two men separated a hand span apart. John sighed.

             “I’ll take what I can get,” he said as he moved the scanner over them head to toe. He linked the scanner to the i/o cube and downloaded the data into the mainframe. “Sweetheart, will you correlate these readings to the particle-wave signature of energy readings taken in the last week? Thanks, doll. Martha!” he bellowed.” Get your gorgeous butt back up here!”

             Martha emerged from the medical bay with her hands full of printouts. “Bellow at me one more time, Hart, and I’ll have you muzzled. What do you want?”

             “Nothing much. Just stand right there.” He ran the scanner over her. “You can go back now.”

             “No, Martha, stay,” said Jack. “This might be important.”

             “Andy,” John said, “Your turn.”

             “Me? Why?” the former policeman looked at him suspiciously. “I’m as everyday as a bacon buttie. You’re not likely to get anything off me.”

             “Exactly. You’re my control. Now stand still.”

             Once he was finished with Andy, John scanned the torque and went through the process of feeding the data into the mainframe again.  He had barely finished when the monitor lit up, showing the results plotted on a graph. There were three definite clusters of points.

             “Jack, is that even possible?”

             “At this point, I don’t know what is or isn’t possible,” sighed Jack. “It’s what we get. Could the mainframe be mistaken?”

             “Jack, this is bread-and-butter stuff to her. With no evidence of a massive malfunction, I would stand by the results.”

             “What is it?” Andy asked.

             “Here, look.” John pointed. “This is you, Andy, so human you could serve as the template for the species. Here are Jack, Martha, and Ianto. Human – well, with some modifications for Jack -- but showing lots of artron energy in the tissues, all with the same energy-signature. These last ones are the energy readings taken during the time of Donna Noble’s death, your run with the doggies, and the torque. Artron energy, alright, but with a different signature.”

            “And that means…”

             “Whoever is doing this is not from our Universe.”


	5. Chapter 5

            By late afternoon they had run out of leads. The toxicology report showed the “hound” to have no trace of the kind of chemicals that normally accumulated in a modern human’s body. He also had no antibodies against most common childhood diseases – which, according to Martha, meant no vaccination – but he did have all the signs of having survived a number of diseases that had been long eradicated in modern Europe. As ridiculous as it would have sounded if it hadn’t been Torchwood, everything pointed to his having lived at least six to seven hundred years earlier. It was impossible to trace him by any method available to them.

             All tests on the torque proved equally frustrating. It was definitely a Gallifreyan artifact and it showed signs of having been through the Rift, which confirmed the results of the artron energy scan. The amount of artron energy accumulated in the circuitry showed it to have been in use over five hundred years, which confirmed the results of the autopsy on its wearer, and much like him, they had no way to trace it.

             “A great deal of information,” growled Gwen, who had made it back to the Hub exhausted and in a semi-homicidal state of mind, “and we can do damn all with it.”

             “Our best bet is still the poem,” Jack said. “John, Andy, find as many versions of it as you can and feed them to the mainframe. Set up the broadest analysis parameters you can. Anything you can think of, John, and tell your girlfriend to make as many wild-ass guesses as she wants to.”

             “That’ll take a while.”

             “Time is all we have at this moment. Martha, Gwen, go home to your families. Ianto and I can hold down the fort while John and Andy work.”

             From a Torchwood point of view, it was a quiet night, with heavy rain and wind keeping weevils underground. John and Andy had spent a couple of hours setting up the search, and then the four men had idly discussed dinner. Nobody felt like braving the rain or the possibility of more hounds, so they ended up retreating to John’s flat to see what they could find.

             Years before, John had taken over from Jack as the Hub’s permanent resident, but, unlike Jack, he had not been content with a Spartan cubbyhole under the office floor. He had remodeled three unused rooms in one of the older tunnels into living quarters, including a small but very well equipped kitchen. One look at the contents of the fridge freezer had Andy looking at John incredulously.

             “You make your own pizza?”

             John shrugged. “I hate the greasy stuff that passes for pizza around here. I’ll just pop this into the oven. One taste of this, Cop Boy, and you’ll never want another bite of takeaway Italian again.”

             They had to admit John was right. The crispy-crusted pie layered with fresh vegetables and dusted with mozzarella and parmesan was wolfed down in record time. A second one was baked and consumed at a much more leisurely pace, accompanied by a nice Chianti.

             “It occurs to me,” Andy said, snatching the last slice of pizza from under Jack’s hand, “that my life in Torchwood consists of long stretches of boring office work broken up by moments of sheer panic and punctuated by really, really strange meals.”

            “Are you calling my pizza strange, Cop Boy?”

             “No, the pizza’s delicious. It’s just that I’m eating it in an underground flat built into the secret base of a not-so-secret alien-catching organization with two time travelers from the future and a Welshman who has a time machine around his wrist.” As Jack and John lifted their arms to show their straps, he amended with a laugh, “alright, three guys who have time machines strapped to their wrists. And I’m not supposed to think it all strange?”

             Ianto snickered. “Around here? That’s very…”

             Whatever he was going to say was drowned out by the klaxons of the Hub’s alarms. The mainframe monitor on John’s desk lit up, the screen quartered to show the main work areas. A ghostly figure in an elaborate robe and skullcap could be seen standing near the fountain. He was ignoring the racket as he surveyed the Hub.

             “Time Lord,” Ianto hissed.

             John reached under the table. They could hear a soft click and a wall panel slid open to reveal a small collection of neatly mounted weapons. He picked up some palm-sized ovoids with a depression at one end and a bell-shaped muzzle at the other.

             “Energy disruptors,” he whispered, demonstrating as he went. “Just aim and press down on the button inside the depression. They're a bit like a point-and-shoot camera, but they do the job.”

             Jack and Andy accepted the offer. Ianto shook his head, pointing at his wrist.

             “All right, let’s go,” Jack said. “John, Andy, take the side tunnels, come up behind him. Ianto, use the back entrance into my bedroom and come up into the office.”

             “And you’ll be bait,” Ianto said over his shoulder as he moved to obey. He hated those times when Jack set himself up as a target, but he could see the logic of it in this case. Going up against Time Lords was at best a chancy proposition; they needed information, and Jack was their best bet of getting some.

             It didn’t make it any easier to accept.

             Everything in Jack’s old bedroom was where it had been; even in pitch dark Ianto was able to locate the ladder and climb noiselessly into the office. From there he could see the Time Lord. He was moving from work station to work station, obviously looking for something.

             “If I had known I was going to have guests,” Jack said as he emerged from the tunnel, using his wrist strap controls to silence the alarms, “I would have ordered refreshments.”

             The Gallifreyan turned, and Ianto could see his face clearly for the first time. It was a severe, scholarly face, with high arched eyebrows and a mouth like a slash. He carried himself with the conscious arrogance of a man who knew exactly how important he was and expected others to acknowledge it without question.

             “You will cease to interfere.”

             “In any other circumstance I would be more than willing to oblige you. After all, I have a great deal of respect and affection for a particular Time Lord. But” Jack shook his head regretfully, “you have taken something that does not belong to you.”

             “We will not be questioned by an ape!”

             “You need to work on your delivery. Good insults have a certain rhythm you seem to lack.” Jack closed the distance between them slowly. “I will repeat myself. The Donna Noble Potentiality does not belong to you.”

             “We will take what we need.”

             “No, you will not.”

             From his vantage point, Ianto could see John crouched behind his work bench, the converted scanner pointed at the Time Lord. Andy was somewhere in Medical, waiting for Jack’s signal.

             “I will tear you from time itself, ape.” The Time Lord extended his hand towards Jack, making a reach-and-grab motion that ended in an impotent fist. “You are a monstrosity!”

             “You should have done your research, Gallifreyan,” Jack said contemptuously. “I am a fixed point in the space-time continuum, and Time flows around me. I will live until the end of the Universe and I have already seen it. And I will tell you a third time. You have taken something that does not belong to you. We will not allow you to keep it.”

             The Time Lord’s superiority seemed to collapse under Jack’s verbal attack. Snarling, red-faced, he drew himself up and gestured violently with both hands. The mainframe sensor alarms blared as energy was pulled from the Rift.

             Ianto felt time slow around him. He could feel the energy surge as a current along his muscles. He realized he had felt something similar in the Plas while fighting the hounds, but there it had been such a natural part of his body that he hadn’t even noticed it consciously.  This was different; it was _wrong_.

             * _It is out of phase with this Universe. It tears the quantum wave.*_

* _What happens if it hits Jack?_ *

             * _Your One’s perception fields will be permanently damaged, even after rebirth._ *

             “Jack!” Ianto barreled out of the office at top speed and vaulted over the railing, rolling on his shoulder as he landed. As he came to his feet he realized he was still too far from his lover. “Get out of the way!”

             _*Like this._ *

             The instructions poured into his mind and he acted instantaneously. Now that he knew how to look he could see the Rift cascading around him in great green-and-gold sheets. There were dull gashes in the places where the Time Lord had torn them. Ianto reached out and threaded his fingers through the energy. It came away easily, coiling into a glimmering ball that floated between his palms. He was conscious of the Time Lord turning in his direction, his hands full of ugly lightning and his mouth open in horror.

             “What are you?”

             Ianto _thought_ the energy he was holding right into the space between the Time Lord’s hands.

             The blast from the implosion hammered their eardrums, drowning out the Gallifreyan’s agonized scream. As the ghostly figure faded out, the TARDIS sent a probing beam along his escape route.

             “Ianto?”

             “I don’t understand, Jack.” Ianto looked at his lover, and Jack saw that Ianto’s eyes were full of green-and-gold fireflies. “They’re ghosts. They don’t have bodies at all.”


	6. Chapter 6

           “What am I, Jack?”

             Ianto stood in front of the French doors in their bedroom. Beyond them, Cardiff glittered around the inky pool that was the bay at night. He wore nothing but pyjama bottoms and his hair was still dripping wet from the shower.

             They had returned home after helping John and Andy secure the Hub. Ianto had been starving. Jack had fed him soup and buttered toast and bundled him into a hot shower. They had soaped each other, each reassuring himself that the other was alive and well: soapy hands sliding over hot skin, open-eyed kisses, breath hitching as they stroked each other to a gentle orgasm.

             Now Jack sat propped up against the padded headboard and watched Ianto try to cope. Sometimes it seemed to him that he had spent an inordinate amount of time watching Ianto cope with life-altering events.

             “Am I a TARDIS in training? Even saying it sounds ridiculous. I am a human, not a space-time mathematical event that can be imprinted with block-transfer equations! Am I being transformed into some sort of human-Gallifreyan hybrid? Duw, that sounds even worse.”  He turned to face Jack. “In the Plas, after the hounds, you said something about battle TARDIS?”

             “It’s a reference I came across once while traveling with the Doctor. I wanted to make myself useful, so I read everything I could get my hands on about TARDIS. According to one author, Time Lords never considered the idea of mounting weapons on a TARDIS until the prophecies about the upcoming Time War scared them into starting a research program. I asked the Doctor about it and he said that the real reason Time Lords didn’t like the idea of battle TARDIS was that, in order to be effective, they had to be much more autonomous than regular TARDIS. Granting autonomy to a half-wild intelligence armed to the back teeth gave them the heebie-jeebies.”

             “And you think this one,” Ianto said, pointing to his wrist, “might be the prototype of a battle TARDIS?”

             “Not quite. Another thing the author -- she had one of those long Gallifreyan names, Romana-something-something -- said was that there had been other, much earlier, lines of research that had been abandoned. At that point, she turned very prim and coy and dropped the subject. I think that’s what you’ve got. Maybe there was a time when there was no distinction between one form of TARDIS and another?”

             Ianto sat down on the bed next to Jack. “The Doctor’s TARDIS calls it my Teacher.”

             “Now, that’s interesting. Time Lords believe that they are the senior partners in TARDIS relationships. After all, they are the builders. I wonder what the TARDIS think.”

             * _Tell your One we are the next step._ *

             “TARDIS says to tell you they are the next step.”

             * _We._ *

             “Correction. We are the next step.” Ianto threw up his hands. “What the hell does that mean?”

             “I think… I think it means the next evolutionary step.” Jack looked stunned. “It sounds crazy, but… what if one of the lines of research the Time Lords abandoned led to a symbiotic relationship between TARDIS and their makers? Maybe even a merger of some kind?”

             “Would that even be possible?”

             “Why not? TARDIS are space-time beings, pure energy, a different kind of sentience altogether. They might have their own purposes for allowing themselves to be harnessed by the Time Lords.” Jack laughed. “God, that would scare Gallifreyans stupid. Control freaks, every last one of them.”

             * _Your One is most intelligent._ *

             “What did it say?” Jack asked.

             “You can tell when it’s talking to me?”

             “Yeah. Your eyes go a little unfocused. Distracted.”

             “Well, it… approves of you.” Ianto harrumphed a bit at Jack’s delighted crow. “Don’t be so full of yourself.”

             “Hey, the TARDIS is going to be around a while. I need to keep on its good side.”

             “How long, Jack? Do you have any idea?”

             “No, I don’t. But I do know something. TARDIS live for a very long time, and now there’s a very good chance that you will too.” He reached for Ianto. “And I am going to be your One for as long as we have.”

             Ianto slid his hands up Jack’s chest. “Yes.”

             Their mouths met on a sigh, tongues sliding and tangling. Ianto massaged Jack’s shoulders then rubbed circles down his back. Jack grabbed the waistband of Ianto’s pyjamas and yanked.

             “You’re wearing too many clothes,” he whispered as he ran his mouth down Ianto’s neck to pepper his shoulders and chest with little bites.

             “I’m wearing,” Ianto whispered back, bringing one of his hands around to brush lightly, rhythmically, over Jack’s erection, “one lousy little pair of pyjamas.”

             He tightened his grip a little and pleasured them both with long, firm strokes. He loved the satiny texture of Jack’s skin all over, but especially here. Moaning, he slid to his knees on the floor and took Jack in his mouth. Jack’s hands stroked his neck and shoulders then tangled in his hair, encouraging him gently to take more, deeper. He wanted this, he craved it – the way Jack’s body moved, the way his breath caught, the soft murmurs in languages Ianto did not recognize. He used his teeth to scrape lightly along Jack’s length, and was rewarded with his own name, forced out of Jack’s throat in a deep groan. He took one last deep suck, then let go.

             “You bastard,” Jack hissed.

             “Not yet, cariad, not yet.” He stood up and removed his pyjamas. “We have time, remember?”

             He stretched out on top of Jack and pressed his lips to Jack’s throat, tasting his racing pulse. Jack’s arm hooked around his waist to bring their bodies impossibly tight against each other; Jack’s lips found his and his tongue darted out to taste himself in Ianto’s mouth. Kiss upon kiss, quick nips followed by long delights of tongue and teeth that sent fire jolting through their systems. Their hips undulated, rubbing their erections together, pushing their arousal into a fever that made their muscles shake and their breath hitch and sob.

             “Now?” asked Jack.

             “Now,” Ianto replied, barely conscious of having spoken out loud. “Now.”

             Jack felt for the small tube kept on the bedside table. Squeezing some oil on his fingers he rubbed it into Ianto’s opening, gently penetrating, one finger, then two, stroking lightly.

             “I might just shoot you. Now, Jack!”

             “Slow down, love… slow… yeah, like that.” Gripping Ianto’s hips, Jack positioned him and moaned as Ianto sank down, taking him in completely. He ran his hands up Ianto’s torso to flick at his nipples. “Ride me, babe. Make it last.”

             Ianto arched under Jack’s hands, the huge, sensitive, talented hands that knew exactly how to pet and stroke until his skin burned. He took them in his and brought them to his lips as he began to move.

             It could have been minutes or hours; they lost track as they moved, building passion layer upon layer until they were both desperate for release. The speed built hard and fast, thrust and retreat and thrust again, Jack’s hand now stroking Ianto’s erection to the rhythm of Ianto’s chanted _yes, yes, yes, yes_ until they erupted in a glorious rush, muscles spasming then going soft in a series of explosive little ripples.

             “One of these days,” Ianto gasped, sliding down to tuck his head in the crook of Jack’s neck, “we’re going to kill each other.”

             “Yeah. Can’t wait.”

             They held each other while their hearts slowed down to normal. At some point Ianto slid off Jack to lay alongside him, one leg in between Jack’s, held close to his lover’s heart by one arm wrapped around his waist.

             _I love him_ , Jack thought as he felt Ianto drop off to sleep. _Lucky me._

             He must have dozed off, because the next time he opened his eyes sunlight was pouring in and his phone was ringing.

             “Wake up, sleeping beauties,” John’s sarcastic tone could not conceal his excitement. “You two need to get over here. We have some answers.”


	7. Chapter 7

            “It’s a set of equations,” John was fairly vibrating, “embedded in the meter. In Welsh meter. Is there even such a thing? In Welsh?”

             “Oi!” The admonition came from three different directions.

             “Whatever. If anyone wants the details, though beats the hell out of me why anyone would, I filed a report in the case file. It’s a dog’s breakfast of awdlau and caesuras and accent shifts and sound repetition patterns. What it boils down to is that someone actually used Welsh to transmit a major piece of mathematics.”

             He tapped a few times on his i/o cube and the main display screen on the conference room filled with symbols.

             “It looks more like embroidery than maths,” Gwen said.

             “In context it probably is. At this level math can be indistinguishable from art.”

             “And it means?” asked Andy.

             John shrugged. “Damn if I know. This thing is as over my head as the Arnau-Yy’Na’Ari manipulation of Minkowski space through Lorentz transformations to generate self-sustaining wormholes would be to a present day physicist.”

             “I don’t believe it,” said Andy. “Science you can’t understand?”

             “I’m a hell of a computer geek and a fair-to-middling hedge engineer, Andy. This,” John tapped the screen, “is pure mathematics, at a level that makes my head hurt. I can recognize bits and pieces, but that’s it.”

             “What bits and pieces, John?” Ianto asked.

             “This section here,” he tapped the i/o cube again and a section of the symbols glowed bright orange “seems to say that you could generate a pocket Universe if you had enough power.  This one here,” another tap, another section changed color, “seems to be related to some of the equations that serve as the basis of vortex manipulator engineering. That’s all I’ve got.”

             “Jack?”

             “Don’t ask me, Martha. Time Agents weren’t selected for their mathematical acumen. I’m a decent fix-it man, but my training was in psychohistory, social engineering, and tactics.”

             “He was scary good at those,” said John. “Give him a couple dozen vids of any one place and he could work out its entire cultural matrix and where its vulnerable spots were.”

             “Helpful, I’m sure,” Andy muttered, “if we ever want to take over Andorra. But if we can’t figure out what this means we’re back where we started.”

             “Not quite,” Jack pointed at Andy. “You’re forgetting my other talent, Andy.”

             “We’re not going to start talking about sex, are we?”

             There was a burst of laughter from the others. Jack aimed his best sexy grin at Andy. “Only if you want to… but no, Andy. I’ve always thought my best talent was making friends.”

             He plugged his cell phone into the mainframe port built into the table and speed-dialed a number.

             “Hello.”

             The equations in the conference room monitor were replaced by the face of a woman. She was no longer young, but her face had the ageless elegance of sharp cheekbones and a generous mouth. Her eyes sparkled with intelligence. Her silver-streaked hair was piled up on top of her head in a classic chignon, and pink diamond drops caught the light as she moved.

             “Sarah Jane, my love, how are you?”

             “Jack Harkness.” Her smile held affection and not a little suspicion. “I’m doing very well, though not nearly as well as you. To what do I owe the pleasure of a Torchwood call?”

             “I need to ask Luke to take a look at something for me.”

             “And you thought he would be visiting his aged mother for the weekend?”

             “His aged mother my… left foot. You are the most gorgeous grandmother in the Western Hemisphere. There are men thirty years your junior that salivate when someone mentions your name.” He grinned impudently. “Besides, I know it happens to be your birthday. Where else would he be?”

             She could hear the sincerity in his voice and it pleased what little vanity she had. “Flatterer. But yes, the whole crew is here for the weekend. I’ll get Luke for you.”

             “Thank you.”

             “No, I should be thanking you.” She flicked a nail at the shimmering pink stone dangling from her ear and set it swinging. “It was an extravagant birthday present, but I adore them.”

             “I knew they would look good on you. Ianto agreed.”

             “Jack, a hag would look good in pink diamonds.”

             “You are not a hag, and every woman should receive diamonds for her birthday at least once in her life.”

             “Devil,” she said affectionately. “I’ll be right back.”

             “Jack,” Martha said as they waited. “Have I mentioned I have a birthday coming up?”

             “Me too!” Gwen agreed. “Me too!”

             “Yes, and you both have husbands,” mocked John. “I think Ianto gets first dibs.”

             “John, I’d look dreadful in pink diamonds.”

             They bantered back and forth until a new face appeared on the screen, a man in his thirties, rather handsome in an Englishman sort of way, but with the kind of smile that made women from eight to eighty sit up and take notice.

             “Hey, Jack. Hi, guys.”

             There was a chorus of hellos from around the table.

             “Luke. Nice to see you again. How’s the family?”

             “Fantastic. Settling back down in Cambridge. Berkeley was fun but it’s nice to be home.”

             “I’ll bet, mister youngest-chair-of-maths-in-Oxbridge.”

             Luke actually blushed. “What can I tell you, Jack? I’m good at what I do.”

             “Which is why I called. We have something here neither John nor I can make head or tails out of.”

             “Must be some something. Send it through?”

             John tapped his i/o cube once more. They only had to wait a few seconds until Luke’s face lit up like a kid’s on Christmas morning. “Wow. As my American colleagues would say, hot damn. That’s some serious math.”

             “Can you do something with it? Luke? _Luke_?”

             “Uh?” Distracted eyes met his. “Yes, probably. I’ll call back soon, ok?”

             “And he goes under for the last time, ladies and gentlemen!”

             “Ha-ha. Funny, Jack. Call you later.”

             Jack disconnected the call and sat back with a satisfied smirk. “And that is that. We’ll have answers.”

             “You’re always telling us how there are things we’re not supposed to know, just in case we do something that could change the future,” Gwen ventured diffidently, “but you just gave Luke Smith something so far ahead of our time that even John couldn’t understand it. Wouldn’t that, well… I mean, I know we can trust him…”

             “I thought about that, Gwen.” Jack seemed to make up his mind about something. “All right, here’s a secret you are all going to have to keep. Luke is already changing the future. His work will create the foundation for what historians in my time call the Great Expansion. Humans will go into space because Luke Smith developed the mathematics for it.”

             “And it actually may be that it happened partly because Jack gave him those equations,"said John quietly. “I just remembered. In one of the interviews he gave after winning the Nobel he said that he was very frustrated with his work on general relativity field equations until a friend asked him to solve a puzzle.”

             “So Luke Smith invented space travel because someone from the future came back in time and handed him a bunch of equations from the future? And that won’t damage the time lines because Jack was meant to do it in the first place?” Andy groaned as he rubbed his temples. “Duw, you people give me a headache with all the timey-wimey stuff.”

             “It’s not that simple, Andy…”

             “Nonononono! Be quiet, John. The less we know the better, right? Right. That way I won’t need any paracetamol to function.” He took a deep breath. “Making a fool of myself may be enough of a headache for today, thank you very much.”

             “Andy, what’s wrong?” asked Gwen.

             “I’m going to stick my neck out and probably look like a prat, but here goes. All last night I kept thinking about this Gwair bloke. Why did he mention Caerau? Thieves are not usually so accommodating in giving police clues to their domiciles. And Jack, you said he didn’t seem happy with what he was doing. And then it hit me. Caerau means _from the castle._ ”

             “But the poem mentions lots of castles, Andy,” said John.

             “Well, there you go. Maybe yes, maybe not. Some scholars think it’s all one castle, but Taliesin was using the different names as descriptions. So, one castle. In Caerau there’s a Norman castle built on the site of an Iron Age fortification. Falling down like a Saturday drunk, of course.” He looked around the table. “This is probably bollocks…”

             “Don’t second guess yourself, Andy,” Jack said. “Keep going.”

             “So I went out to Caerau this morning. There’s a new bunch of uni folks digging there again. They’ve found a new area in the old Iron Age fort they think was used as an astronomical observatory.” He sipped his tea nervously. “For the rest, though, is back to the Preiddeu. See, the first castle mentioned in the poem is Caer Sidi. Now, some people say it means _the revolving castle_ but others say it means _the place of the zodiac_. Wouldn’t that be a good name for an observatory? They were interested in predictions from the stars and all that sort of stuff.”

             Jack started to say something, but Andy interrupted him.

             “And another thing. The folks at the dig are really accommodating, gave me a tour and everything. The observatory has a room that they call the Treasury because it’s full of old pots and jugs, and they’ve found some neat little coins and such. The poem says Gwair is kept prisoner among the spoils of Annwfn, and he must sing songs about them for all eternity.”

             “You know, Andy,” John said respectfully. “When you speculate, you _speculate_.”

             “Oh, there’s more, In the center of the room there’s an upright stone, which they tell me is unusual because it’s inside, and it has a carving on it of a torque and the word Uffern under it, and a big hole on the ground in front of it that was used for a firepit.” He looked around to find everyone staring at him raptly. “Well, don’t you see? There’s a stanza in the Preiddeu that says _before the door of the gate of Uffern the lamp was burning_. Uffern is the welsh name for the Underworld. A separate world altogether. I think the poem is like, well, like driving directions. We might not know how to get to where these thieving Time Lords are, but we know where to find them.”


	8. Chapter 8

            Nobody went home that day until Jack told them firmly to leave. The next morning, everyone had an excuse why they had to be in the Hub at the crack of dawn. They tried to keep up with their regular routines, but every time Jack’s phone rang, heads turned.  In order to keep from going spare, Ianto took over procuring lunch, making coffee, and helping John and Andy catalog and archive recently acquired artifacts. Finally, just as they were all wondering if they were going to have to wait until the next day – or longer – Jack summoned them to the conference room.

            “Luke, everyone’s here. Go ahead.”

             “Guys, this is amazing. Just amazing. I’m not going to ask how you got it, because I know you can’t tell me, but it’s just amazing!”

             ‘That’s nice, Luke. What is it exactly?”

             “It’s a way to collapse a bubble universe.”

             “That would imply,” John said carefully, “that one can create a bubble universe. I’ve heard of pocket universes, but bubbles… I thought they were impossible.”

             “Well, the implied theory seems sound. Certainly the technology is. Given enough power, you can fold space-time to enclose a determinate amount of itself into a pocket. It’s small but it behaves as a proper Universe should, and one can deduce its operating principles from observation and experimentation. These equations say that there is a way to create a pocket Universe then detach it from the multi-universe matrix. As long as it’s tethered at one point to its parent, it will be stable.” He shrugged. “Needs massive amounts of power to sustain it, though, but it could be done.”

             “So assume someone has managed to create a bubble Universe,” Jack said. “Do the equations tell us how to collapse it?”

             “It actually does two things. First, it tells you how to open a door into it, and second, it tells you how to burst the bubble. It has to be done from the inside.”

             ‘That doesn’t sound,” Gwen searched for the right word, “healthy.”

             “Might not be.”

             “So how do we go about collapsing this bubble if we have to?” Jack asked.

             “The second half is actually a set of directions for building the machine that does the job.”

             “How fast can it be done?”

             “I don’t know, Jack. We would be starting from scratch. Finding the right parts alone could take months.”

             “Ianto,” Jack said. “Could you ask your friend if we have months?”

             * _Tell your One that we do not. Potentialities are fragile in captivity. If the correct processes are not initiated promptly or not done correctly, the Potentiality will terminate.*_

_*How long do we have?*_

_*A few days, no more.*_

            “We only have a few days, Jack.”

             Luke’s face fell. “There’s no way. Most of the mechanical parts I can get or machine myself, but there’s no way in hell I can get or make the electronics in a few days. Unless Torchwood has something in one of their vaults, it will take quite a bit of looking in some very secretive places.”

             “Actually,” John said, “there might be something. I recognized some of the equations. The basis of this bubble popper is the ability to manipulate small amounts of vortex energy with pinpoint accuracy, right?”

             “Yeah.”

             John lifted his arm to show the strap. “This will do the job.”

             “John, no!” Jack protested.

             “It’s not like I’m getting a lot of use out of it, Jack,” the former time agent shrugged. “Modifying this will give us the best chance we have. No, don’t open your mouth. Yours is an older model and besides, you might need it someday.”

             “You’re all talking as if the modifications would be permanent,” Gwen said. “Couldn’t you just fix it back to what it was before once we’re done?”

             John shook his head. “Luke said the bubble would have to be collapsed from the inside. Unless we want to be collapsed with it, we will need to set the device on a time delay and let it do the job while we run like hell. Right, Luke?”

             “Yeah.  There’s a tiny chance the device itself would survive, would it would be damaged beyond repair, at least for its original purpose.”

             “So there we are.”

             “John,” Jack tried again, “if you do this, you are trapped on Earth for the rest of your life. I have chosen the linear path. Let it be mine.”

             “Jack… how old am I?”

             “Sixty-three.”

             “And looking good, wouldn’t you say?” John grinned cockily, then, noticing all the serious faces, smacked the table for emphasis. “Come on, guys. Let me lay it out for you. My people are – will be – short-lived by galactic standards. Jack here normally would have lived to over two hundred even before he got his Vortex overdose. I wouldn’t have made it past one hundred and twenty. Even with the stuff the Time Agency did to me, I ‘m not making it past one sixty. If everything goes my way and I don’t get chomped by a weevil or terminated in one of Earth’s periodic encounters with the homicidal pepper pots, I have about ninety years of productive life left. I choose to spend them on this particular dirt ball. I’ve grown attached to it for some reason.”

             “So you could be anywhere and do anything,” Andy said, “and you choose to live in Cardiff for a hundred years. I always knew there was something wrong with your brain!”

             “I didn’t say anything about Cardiff. Maybe I’ll just skip down to Ibiza and spend my days on the beach and my nights romancing the señoritas.”

             “Without the mainframe, you’d be bored in a week,” Andy snorted.

             “You’re probably right, Andy. Luke, I’ll send you the schematics for the vortex manipulator…”

             “Oh, I already have those.” Luke laughed a bit sheepishly. “I stole them from Jack years ago.”

             “Luke!” Jack sounded delighted rater than scandalized. “When?”

             ‘Remember that long weekend you came to stay with Mom, right after… well, right after Ianto left? You took the wrist strap off to go swimming, then everyone showed up for dinner and you forgot all about it until the following day. I stayed up all night working on it.”

            "Bad Luke. Baad Luke. So how long will it take you to finish them?”

             “Stayed up last night, too. I knew it would be your best bet but I was hoping you would have another option; I know how important the manipulator is to you. I don’t think that there are that many differences between John’s and yours, are there?”

             “Not really. Same basic design.”

             “OK, here goes.” The Mainframe hummed and beeped in the pattern they had all learned to recognize as _incoming message_. John examined the information scrolling across the screen, unconsciously humming in counterpoint. Once the last line scrolled off, Luke’s face reappeared.

             “What do you think, John?”

             “It seems simple enough.”

             ‘It is. Whoever developed this has a very elegant mind.” He turned his head to look at someone they couldn’t see. “I have to go. We’re heading back, classes start tomorrow. You have my cell number. Call me, ok? Whatever happens let me know you guys are all right.”

             “We will, Luke.” Jack ended the call and turned to John, who was studying the monitor on his handheld. “John, how long will it take you to make the modifications?”

             “Only a few hours. It’s actually quite simple. Elegant, as Luke said.”

             “All right, get to work. Andy, you’re our poetry expert. Scour that thing for more clues. Martha, get together a field kit that we can take. You’ll need to get the med bay ready for major injuries, just in case. Gwen, I’m going to need you to Hub sit. Don’t narrow your eyes at me like that. You have been trained specifically to take over if something happens to me. We could all disappear tomorrow and you and Martha could pick up the pieces and keep Torchwood a going concern. Martha…”

             A blast of wind rattled the conference room’s glass walls. It was immediately followed by the familiar vworp vworp sound of a blue police call box materializing near the fountain. Jack looked at Martha, who shook her head. The TARDIS had barely settled when the door opened and an obviously irritated Doctor bounced out.

             “Oi! Torchwood! Jack! Martha!”

             Jack and Martha rushed downstairs, followed by the rest of them at a more sedate pace. Ianto brought up the rear. He was nervous; one look and the Doctor would know what was happening to him. Ianto was worried about his reaction, if only for Jack’s sake.

             “Doctor? What are you doing here?”

             The Time Lord threw up his hands. “You tell me, Jack. I’m half-way to the Serenity cluster and suddenly she takes it in her head to come to Cardiff. Overrode all the controls. Then, just to jam the cork in it, she refuses to park in her usual place and plops down right inside your Hub. What is going on, Jack?”

             “Quite a bit, Doctor. Martha and I were…”

             Jack realized the Doctor’s attention had already fixed somewhere else. He turned to see what the Time Lord was looking at with such a rapt expression. Ianto stood at the bottom of the stairs, staring back defiantly.

             “Jack,” the Doctor clapped his hands like a child being offered his favorite treat. “This is fantastic!”


	9. Chapter 9

            Jack stared at the large mound. All he could see was a lot of  trees and a rather forlorn ruined church. If he twisted himself into a pretzel, he could glimpse a couple of tents set up between the church and a ditch on the south side of the mound.

             “Andy,” he said grumpily. “I thought you said there was a castle around here.”

             “It’s a ringwork, you twypsin! The palisade and the keep were wood and they rotted away long ago. Just follow me.”

             He stalked away, muttering to himself. Jack followed, grinning at the Doctor, who grinned back in his most maniacal fashion. There had been no chance of keeping the Time Lord in the Hub this time, and, truth be told, Jack hadn’t tried too hard. He had difficulty dealing with the idea of Potentialities, but a brief demonstration from Ianto and a couple of scans and he adjusted to the shift in reality. Not happily, but he managed it.

             When told about Donna, though, the Doctor had blanched and gone silent. Jack knew he had a special spot in his hearts for the flamboyant, acerbic redhead. Donna had been the closest thing to a sister the Doctor had ever had; a human-style, bug-the-hell-out-of-older-brother sister. The idea that it might not have been necessary to wipe her memory shattered him. Even after Ianto had pointed out that Donna’s human mind had been buckling under the pressure of the metacrisis, the Doctor remained somehow convinced that he could have done something else, something more.

             That someone had dared to manhandle Donna at the moment of her death had filled the Time Lord with a rage all the more terrifying for its self-contained impassivity. Martha had told them later that the last time he had seen the Doctor that angry was in his dealings with the Family. She still had nightmares, she had said, about the punishments the Doctor had meted out.

             They trudged around the mound, Andy in the lead and Jack bringing up the rear. The excavation site was ringed with rope and guarded by a careless young layabout who was more than happy to retreat to the nearest pub with twenty quid in his pocket and the excuse of _Torchwood made me do it._

             They followed the clearly-marked path to the dig site. Things were exactly as Andy had described them. The standing stone wasn’t large, but its carvings stood starkly white against its mossy, dirt-encrusted surface. The Doctor brushed his fingers over them, then pressed as close to the stone as he could without touching it and took a deep sniff.

             “Aim your device here, Mr. Hart.”

             John pressed a couple of buttons on the manipulator then aimed it at the stone. They all felt the whine of gathering energy. Slowly the stone faded to a ghostly image. Through it they could see a meadow of knee-high coppery grass, dotted with silver-leaved trees loaded down with green fruit. Beyond that rose a castle right out of a fairy tale. Its high walls were made of alternating bands of metal and stone, each inlaid with the other in abstract designs. Delicate glass spires and hanging gardens could be glimpsed inside them.

             “It’s a lyari,” the Doctor said. “A rather elaborate one.”

             “A whatziz, Doctor?”

             “A rich man’s folly, Andy. The equivalent of the Brighton Pavilion. There was a fashion for them in Gallifrey at one point.” He made an after-you-Alphonse gesture. “Time’s a-wasting, gentlemen.”

             They stepped through into a piece of Gallifrey. Jack looked around curiously. While traveling with the Doctor he had dug through the TARDIS’s library for as much information on the Time Lord home planet as he could find, so some of it seemed familiar at second-hand. He broke off a blade of grass and sniffed it.

             “Cinnamon,” Ianto murmured. “And the fruit of those trees tastes like sweet rain.”

             “How do you know?”

             “The Doctor’s TARDIS took me to a similar place right after this.” He tapped his wrist. “The place I was in had a very large city in the distance, and beautiful snow-capped mountains and you could see the moons and the sky change colors. Here…”

             They both looked up. In place of a sky there was a pewter dome that shaded towards black at the edges, where it met the meadow.

             “ _In Caer Pedryvan, in the Isle of the Strong Door, where twilight and pitchy darkness meet together_ ,” Andy quoted. “It’s fucking creepy, this place.”

             “Trust Andy to bring us back to reality,” Jack sighed. “He’s right. It’s a creepy place.”

             As they neared the castle, they saw that sculptures of men and women in what must have been the Gallifreyan equivalent of armor had been evenly spaced along the battlements.

             “ _Three-score hundred stood in the walls_ ,” Andy quoted again. “What the hell is that for? Who do they think will invade?”

             “Another piece of foolishness,” said the Doctor. “The lyariei were all about the fantasy of power, and what is more powerful than to rule over men? Those things are androids. Most lyari owners avoided having to deal with servants. Too expensive and too demanding. Can you imagine the food bill? Or the size of the servants’ quarters?”

             “I’m not concerned about that,” Andy muttered. “I’d just like a fix on the kennels.”

             “Never mind the kennels, Andy,” Ianto said. “Here are the dogs.”

             Six white-and-red hounds rose from the tall grass that grew against the massive stone and metal walls. They growled softly as they began to move, circling the group. Jack, John, and Andy pulled out their guns; Ianto waited, gathering energy as he had been taught.  The Doctor, however, had other ideas.

             “Nice doggies!” He almost bounced out of his trainers as he moved towards the hounds. “Look, Jack, aren’t they handsome?”

             “Gorgeous, Doc,” Jack said, keeping a wary eye on the growling animals. “Keep your fingers out of reach, ok?”

             “Oh, they won’t hurt me, Jack,” the Doctor said reprovingly as he reached into his pocket and pulled out the sonic screwdriver. “They’re niiiice doggies.”

             He pointed the screwdriver and pressed something. The hounds sat back on their haunches and howled, then flopped onto their bellies, their front paws batting at their ears. Suddenly, the spheres at the ends of the torques blew apart with sharp pops, and six young men in short gray robes lay on the ground, twitching slightly.

             “Neat trick,” John said.

             “I don’t have time to deal with foot soldiers,” the Doctor said, “especially not conscripts. It’s the generals I’ve got business with.”

             They marched on towards the castle. As they came closer they could see that the beautiful walls were pitted and rusted, and pieces of the android soldiers lay shattered on the ground. The massive gates were in slightly better condition. They were fashioned out of great sheets of hammered metal and inset with panels of translucent stone carved with complex geometric patterns. Exactly in the center, obviously the equivalent of a lock, was a gold plate with a depression in the shape of a hand.

              “Can you open it, Doc?”

             “Under regular circumstances, yes. These door plates are basically DNA readers. You were supposed to program them with the genetic code of those you wanted to have access to your home. Pathetically easy to fool.”

             “So what’s the problem?”

             "They are from another Universe, Jack. There are minute differences at the cellular level that I can’t fake.”

             _*Tell the Other’s One not to worry. We will assist him.*_

             “Doctor,” Ianto stepped up to stand next to the Time Lord, “TARDIS says we can help you.”

             “Oh?”

             _*Tell him to put his hand on the plate.*_

             Ianto relayed the instruction. The Doctor complied without a word.

             _*Now. Like this.*_

             Ianto placed his hand over the Doctor’s, matching finger placement exactly. He could see the Time Lord’s energy patterns, could feel them under his fingers. He used his own to subtly alter them, tweaking them into different channels sometimes no more than a cell’s breadth apart, then _pushed_ them into the plate.

             The gates swung open.

             The Doctor rubbed his palms together. “That was interesting. You and I need to have some very long conversations, Ianto. Very, very long conversations.”

             Ianto rolled his eyes. “Later, Doctor.”

             They stepped into a wide courtyard surrounded by elegant buildings that flowed sinuously upwards and tapered off into delicate turrets. A long time ago they must have been very beautiful, but now they were all in varying stages of disrepair. Several doors hung from their hinges.

             “Andy,” Jack said. “You’re the expert. Where should we go next?”

             “Find Gwair. He’s kept chained somewhere around here.”

             Jack looked around. “Lots of places to search.”

             The Doctor cocked an eyebrow at Ianto. “Would your friend oblige?”

             “I don’t think he needs to,” Ianto reached for Jack’s hand, centering himself in his One’s incandescent life force. It didn’t take long to locate the alien energies. “Eight. In that building, top floor or the one lower down.”

             They went in police-style, guns drawn and sweeping the place for traps, but it was deserted and had been for a very long time. A thick coating of dust lay everywhere and small mouse-like creatures nested openly in corners and under furniture. It wasn’t until they reached the upper landing that they saw signs of habitation. The place was scrubbed and polished to a fare-thee-well, and there was a faint scent of cooking.

             There was only one door on the landing, a huge affair nearly the match of the wall gates. This time, though, it swung open as they approached. A blast of energy lifted them off their feet and threw them about like ninepins. In its wake, seven ghostly figures stalked through, right hands raised and pointed at Jack and Ianto. They collapsed, convulsing as alien energy surged through them. From inside the room, a voice cried out.

             “Help them. Don’t let them die. Help them!”


	10. Chapter 10

            The Doctor rushed to stand over Jack’s and Ianto’s bodies, using his sonic screwdriver almost like a sword to deflect the energy being thrown at them. The ghostly Time Lords pressed in, trying to overwhelm him. The attack forced him to his knees, but he still managed to block their thrusts.

             “Andy, John,” he shouted, “get inside that room. Seven items with identical symbols on them. Start smashing!”

             Two of the ghosts tried to follow John and Andy, but when they reached the doorway they bounced back as if they had hit a brick wall. The Doctor’s actions had given Ianto a little breathing space. He knew he wasn’t strong enough to take the ghosts on by himself, but he could help the Doctor keep them pinned in place until John and Andy could finish their job.

             He didn’t have long to wait. The sound of smashing glass from the other room made the ghosts scream in agony. The attack ended as abruptly as it had begun.

             “Stop! Please stop!”

             “Andy, John,” the Doctor shouted, “hold off for a moment!” He turned to Jack and Ianto. “Are you two all right?”

             Ianto helped Jack to stand up. “We’re fine, Doctor.”

             “Yeah,” Jack muttered, “as soon as the elves stop playing bagpipes in my head I’ll be just great!”

             “Well, then, let’s go see what’s what. Allons-y, gentlemen.”

             The room was round, and not very large. A central column carved to resemble a tree supported a domed crystal roof. Its branches spread across the glass and ran down the walls. The tree was circled by a large platform with four staircases leading up to it from each cardinal point, ending in a work station complete with crystal dials and buttons. At one end of the room, seven high-backed chairs had been placed in a semicircle, facing the tree. In each chair rested a carved crystal casket. Two of them had been smashed to powder. Andy and John stood over a third, guns at the ready. 

             “It’s a TARDIS control room!” Jack said to the Doctor. “There are a few differences, but that’s what this is supposed to be.”

             “In honour of our Lady.” One of the ghosts spoke directly to the Doctor, ignoring Jack as if he had been a piece of furniture. “She was lost to us in the War.”

             “Lost?” A harsh voice said contemptuously. They turned to face the speaker. The young man Jack had seen at the hospital stood in a small archway. He was secured to a large ring set in the stone by a thick bluish-gray metal chain long enough to allow him to move all through the rooms and probably the landing outside.

             The ghostly Time Lord turned and pointed at the young man, who collapsed to his knees, tears running down his face. The Doctor ran to his side, but was shoved to the ground as a bolt of energy smashed into the wall right above his head. He turned to see  another one of the ghosts start to point.

             “Oi! Gwallgofddyn!” bellowed Andy, as he brought the butt of his gun down on top of one of the caskets. “Do you want me to finish this off?”

             “No!”

             “Then behave!”

             The Doctor jumped up then assisted the young man to his feet. “My thanks. Gwair, is it?”

             “Gwair…” he broke off, laughing bitterly. “Captive, that’s what that means. I’ve been here so long, I’ve nearly forgotten my own name. I am Tyren, and I was an engineer at the hyper-loom complex in the Eye of Harmony.”

            “Then my thanks to Tyren, TARDIS Engineer.” The Doctor shook his hand. “And we better see about this.”

             He pressed the sonic screwdriver against the section of the chain where it has been soldered to itself. There was a sound like frying sausages and an acrid smell that scraped the back of the throat. The chain fell open at Gwair’s – Tyren’s – feet.

             “Tyren, where is Donna Noble?" Jack asked.

             “One more illusion to destroy, Captain Harkness,” Tyren pointed at the column. “The device you used to get here should work.”

             John walked to the center of the room. “Where?”

             “Where the column and the platform meet.”

             The ghost who had fired at the Doctor surged towards John. “Nooo!”

             “Listen, you moron,” Andy tapped the casket with the butt of his gun, this time chipping off several small pieces. “I told you to behave!”

             John aimed the manipulator at the column and pressed the buttons. Parts of the column and the platform faded away. In their place was a framework of gleaming black metal supporting a cauldron-shaped space outlined by nine white spheres that gleamed like pearls. Lines extended from the pearls, creating a cradle where red-gold energy burned sullenly.

             “A hyper-loom!” said the Doctor. “You have been trying to grow a TARDIS?”

             Tyren nodded. “They thought it was safe now.”

             “Be silent!” snapped one of the ghosts. “This is Time Lord business.”

             “Very well,” said the Doctor. “Time Lord to Time Lord, who are you and what in the name of Rassilon do you think you’re doing?”

             “Our Universe was overrun by Daleks. We could not hold them back. Our crew was instructed to defend the Neural Construction Docks.  We came under heavy fire and our Lady was damaged beyond repair. With the last of her strength she built us this Universe so we could start again someday.”

             “Ummm… I see.” The Doctor and Jack exchanged a look. “Tyren, do you corroborate this story?”

             “No, I do not.” The young man’s eyes were full of contempt as he looked at the cowering Time Lords. “They were so terrified of the Daleks that they tried to bargain. Contacted the commander of one of the advance fleets, turned over all the defense plans, the routes to the Docks, everything they could get, in exchange for their lives. Well, if you know Daleks you know how well that worked. They barely managed to get away. They showed up at the Nursery one step ahead of the Dalek fleet and grabbed one of the hyper-looms…and me. Then they ran, looking for any bolt hole.”

             “And they found the Rift,” Jack prompted.

             “We hid inside it for centuries, searching for the right place, one where Time Lords and Daleks exterminated each other. They thought it would be easier for them. Their probability reads said this was the place, so they used up the last of their fuel to break free of the Rift.” He laughed. “When they realized they had gotten it wrong again, they did what they do best. They hid. Cannibalized their TARDIS to create this place and send it back in time, then discarded their bodies and sealed themselves in their caskets.”

            “Chameleon arches?”

             “Yes. Some Time Lords carried them to battle, as a last measure.” Tyren shrugged. “And there we stayed for a millennia, waiting until it was safe to emerge, monitoring the energy patterns for the appearance of wild TARDIS they could use.”

             “And their Lady?” Ianto asked softly.

             “When she realized what they had done, what they were, she self-terminated. I had never seen a TARDIS commit suicide before.” He sounded like a lost child. “I couldn’t stop her!”

             There was a long silence, then the Doctor turned to the ghosts. “Jack? Whom do you believe?”

             Jack grinned fiercely. “Tyren.”

             “You would believe him rather than your own kin? You would trust this monstrosity? His monstrous lover? They are wrong, they do not belong in a Time Lord universe.” One of the ghosts addressed the Doctor. “We could help you recreate Gallifrey. We could be friends, colleagues. My name is…”

             “Be silent,” the Doctor said mildly. “You have forfeited your right to a name and to any claim of kinship. As for these monstrosities, whatever they are or will be, they are _mine_. Mine to care for and protect and love. The one you stole was my best friend, the sister of my spirit. Do you really think I would trade her for you? Let you turn her into your servant?”

             "That’s the best part of it,” Gwair said. “They can’t. She refuses to accept imprinting.”

             “Well, she wouldn’t, would she?  The poem says the cauldron _will not cook the food of a coward or one forsworn_. Miss Noble sounds like a hell of a lady. She wouldn’t want any business with this lot.” Andy looked at Tyren with a smile. “You wrote it, didn’t you?”

             “They let me out from time to time to observe and report back. And… to do what they want. I saw the Doctor and Captain Harkness and I knew I would have a chance. So I went back to the almost-beginning and planted the poem on the bard.” He laughed. ‘They always underestimated me. I’m a time Engineer. I have a few tricks of my own.”

             The Doctor reached into the hyper-loom to stroke the energy; it seemed to grow brighter at his touch. “Release her, Tyren. As for the rest of you…”

             “Can’t you understand? We want to live again, to have bodies again, to feel!”

             “Whose bodies were you planning to use? Whose lives would you have stolen?” The Doctor smiled bitterly. “And what have you done to me? Now I have to destroy my own one more time.”

             _*Tell the Other’s One that it is not his place. The crime was committed against TARDIS. We both speak for our kind.*_

             “Doctor,” Ianto said. “The TARDIS say that it is up to them to dispense justice in this case. I really don’t think we should interfere.”

             The Doctor stared at him for a moment, then nodded and stepped back.

             _*Like this.*_

             Ianto could feel the two TARDIS reach into his mind. He expanded again and again as the Vortex traveled through him. He looked at the ghosts, and in less time than it takes a heart to beat twice he measured and chose carefully. The caskets exploded as the ghosts winked out of existence.

             “Duw,” Andy whispered. “Can we just get out of here?”

             “My thoughts exactly,” said John. He took off his wrist strap and laid it on the platform. “We have ten minutes. Let’s move, people. Tyren, with us.”

             “I cannot. I am over a thousand years old. My body is maintained by the same energy that sustains this Universe. When it disappears so will I. As will the hounds.” He grinned joyfully. “We will be free. Go, all of you. Run!”

             They pelted down the stairs, across the courtyard, and through the open castle gates. Ianto could hear Jack and the Doctor laughing like idiots and realized he was grinning himself. As they neared the standing stone, they could see the dome starting to collapse. Lightning crisscrossed its surface and set the copper grass on fire; from behind them came the sounds of glass and metal being crushed. They dove through the opening just as it was starting to fold in on itself, landing in a heap on the dirt floor of the dig.

             The Doctor turned over, narrowly avoiding shoving an elbow into Andy’s stomach, to find a ball of red-gold energy floating in front of him. He extended a hand. The energy enveloped it, then flowed up his arm, rubbed against his face like a cat, then winked out.

             “Good-bye, Donna,” the Doctor voice hitched. “You were fantastic.”

             Ianto leaned into Jack and whispered. “He doesn’t get it yet.”

             “Get what?”

             “Jack, how did the doctor get his TARDIS?”

             “He… well… requisitioned it.”

             “He stole it, Jack.” Ianto chortled. “And it never occurred to him to ask himself why a TARDIS that was already bonded to another would allow herself to be stolen so easily?”

             Jack’s jaw dropped half way to his knees. ‘You mean…”

             “She’s not only traveling through space, but back in time. Soon she will join a small herd that will be corralled and taken to the hyper-looms at the Eye of Harmony. She will grow herself, and she will wait for him until he is ready.”

             Jack gave a great shout of laughter. His merriment set Ianto off and the two laughed until tears ran down their faces.

             “Oi, you two!” The Doctor bounced up to them “What’s so funny?”

 


End file.
